UTSA lands national education reform center

SAN ANTONIO - — The National Center for Accelerated Schools, a reform effort that focuses on school improvement in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, has a new headquarters: the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Express Newsletters

Get the latest news, sports and food features sent directly to your inbox.

Also known as the Accelerated Schools Project, the program was launched at Stanford University by Henry Levin, who is slated to dedicate the new “hub” Friday evening with a ribbon-cutting and symposium.

It seeks to change a struggling campus' culture from within, in ways that help it achieve better test scores, improve teacher retention and quality, reduce disciplinary problems, and boost overall morale, said Joan Vasbinder, the center's director.

The center dispatches a trained educator to work with teachers, parents, school administrators and staff at least one full day a week to develop an improvement plan. The school's stakeholders hold meetings, review data, draft goals and take action, with academics sent to monitor progress and offer feedback.

“The main challenges for our center are funding, getting districts to admit they need outside support, and maintaining patience to see truly sustainable results, which usually takes five to seven years, national research shows,” Vasbinder said.

Nationally, the program is more active in schools that get federal grants for improvement, which can be used to contract with the center. It has had a regional hub at UTSA for several years.

Vasbinder first implemented the program as a principal in Austin ISD in the late 1980s and has since championed its growth in other parts of the Southwest.

She said both traditional public school districts, such as Edgewood and Somerset, and charter schools here have embraced the center's approach. Currently, three local charter districts are working with the center, including Higgs, Carter, King Gifted and Talented Charter Academy; George Gervin Academy, and Southwest Preparatory School District.

Higgs' superintendent Claudette Yarbrough said her school has worked with the center to tackle various challenges for 10 years, focusing on its core population of students who may have fallen through the cracks at traditional public school systems.

“What I like about the center's approach is that it focuses on not remediating students, but instructing them at the grade level they are at, and then working to accelerate them up to speed,” Yarbrough said. “Remediation doesn't work very well from our experience.”

Yarbrough credited UTSA's center for helping Higgs make gains over the past few years by streamlining its vision and offering guidance on how to improve student achievement and parental involvement.

That sentiment was echoed by Barbara Hawkins, George Gervin Academy's superintendent. Both founded their charters in the 1990s and said they have tried to weave in suggestions from the Acclerated Schools model into their operations almost from the beginning.

More Information

In its new role, the UTSA national hub, which was moved from the University of Texas at Austin, will support other centers implementing the same ideas in other parts of the United States. Project leaders hope the location here will allow it to expand to more Bexar County and South Texas schools.